The man who came to be known as the psyche washed up in the basement of the gatekeeper’s house one unseasonably rainy day.
He took a look at all the crap—centuries’, universes’ worth of boxes and nameless objects, a blank, universal sludge—and then climbed some stairs. When he met a door, he knocked on it, but nobody answered, so he opened it and found himself in a kitchen. A regular, human kitchen. With his memories of the before already fading, he spun around and looked back, catching in his eye just the corner of the crawl space from whence he came.
(The crawl space that separated solid basement from multiversal hallway, the red-checkered tablecloth that formed the barrier between no and yes, the red-checkered tablecloth that had drawn him in from the hallway mere seconds(?) ago—his parietal cortex now resisted notions of time, the various fragments of his brain still knitting themselves back together. He wasn’t, and now he was. I exist, I am in space, said his cerebellum.)
The floor felt unsteady beneath his feet, but it was probably just him trying to get his land legs again, unused to gravity. He sucked in a big breath of air—there was air here! he didn’t just have to breathe in light and dust—and called out, “Hello?!” Nobody answered. Out of immense conscientiousness, he closed the basement door, now confident this world was real and solid. (He’d seen so many that weren’t—not solid, not yet—but his memories, his memories—) There was an outside, with storm clouds receding, visible through the window above the sink and in the half plate of glass of the door leading out. He hadn’t seen outside since—
The door handle was still and so solid in his hand (briefly, he closed his eyes and imagined he could feel the atoms vibrating—he certainly didn’t feel that down in that basement hallway), but it opened, letting him out into an overgrown garden. Plants, everywhere, in little clumps, rather than in neat rows, cornstalks with creeping bean vines, sunflowers, great gourds strewn across the ground. The air smelled like rain, and honeysuckle, but he couldn’t see any of either. Anything beyond the garden was cordoned off by a thatch of trees, through which a cloud-pale sky could be just glimpsed, and while he had nought left to do but to assume this world was real, he’d feel better talking to a person.
“Hello?” he called out again. A bird nearby took flight, suggesting the existence of its parents, siblings, children, and migratory patterns.
“Oh!” came a voice, and then a skittering through the corn, the stalks swaying as someone meandered through them. The source of the voice turned out to be a mud-covered individual with long auburn curls that were nearly black in how soaking wet they were, someone of average height, with a strong build. They scratched their muddy hand through their hair, leaving a streak of brown across their forehead. (It rained here? Or else there wouldn’t be mud? Rain suggested weather patterns, and weather patterns suggested a world at large.) “You came from the corridor,” they said. It was almost a question.
“Down below? The basement? Before that. A hallway. Lots of doors. Physics suspended,” said the man.
The person nodded. “Yes, the corridor. Or the hallway. Whichever. I’m called the gatekeeper. Do you have a name?”
The man twiddled his thumbs together, thinking. “I did. But I didn’t like it. I was named Francesca, but that’s a terrible name. Well, terrible for me. Didn’t suit me.” The man was the same height as the being called the gatekeeper, but was quite lanky instead (according to his eyes, scanning down his body). He had a crop of very short curls (according to his hands), beige in color (according to his patchworked memories). He was not a Francesca, but he couldn’t think of any other name.
“Well,” said the gatekeeper. “You don’t need to have a name here if you don’t want one.”
“Do you have a name?” asked the man, and it was almost an accusation.
The gatekeeper smiled, a sad half smile, and shook their head. “Some worlds don’t give names.”
“And you never picked one out?”
They laughed, a breathy laugh with deep-pitched hoots in between, and said, “You’re a sharp one, aren’t you?”
“I was a scientist,” he said. “Back home.”
“What kind of world did you live in? A good one? A bad one? Or in between?”
“I don’t know the scale of worlds!”
“Well, you were called a name you hated, so I don’t think it was that good. Did you have nuclear warfare?”
“Some. A long time ago.” But his knowledge of history was fading, like milkweed in the wind.
The gatekeeper stepped closer. Upon reflection, the man realized they’d been disorientatingly far away. “No more, though?” they asked.
“Not unless there’s been some since last I was there.”
They smiled, a little half smile. “You, Mr. Scientist, should understand that it doesn’t quite work like that. Since last you were there.” They snorted. And giggled, again, a breathy giggle. The man said nothing. The gatekeeper began again, “So, what kind of scientist were you?”
He looked down at his hands. His nails were painted gray, and he could not remember why or how he had painted them. With a little brush? chimed in a tiny voice from his prefrontal cortex. How does one remember neuroanatomy and not their own job? “Maybe I did something with the brain.”
“It’s okay if you don’t remember,” said the gatekeeper, their joking manner suddenly turned serious and kind. “A lot of people here don’t and never will.”
“At least I’m still sharp,” sighed the man, still looking at his painted fingernails. A party, before, chickenscratched in the sense-memory of his thalamus, his nails painted because they should be, wearing a sleeveless shirt—no, a blouse, and slacks and low heels because he should.
The gatekeeper nodded. “At least you’re still sharp.”
The gatekeeper took a miraculous garden hose and hosed off the pair of them, both still fully clothed. “For fun,” they said, deathly serious. In the house and soaking wet, the man was given fresh clothes, a pair of trousers, a long shirt, and an apron from a stash under a staircase.
“I’d offer to let you sleep,” said the gatekeeper, “but you seem wide awake.”
The man shrugged and let himself into a random room to change. Inside, it smelled like incense (from where?) and had unlit lamps for burning kerosene (also, from where?). Visible out the window was the other side of the house from the garden, a brief stretch of sloping prairie culminating in a town set above a narrow river. Beyond the river? Prairie, and an aching horizon.
“I figured out what we can call you,” said the gatekeeper upon the man’s emergence into the hallway (his breath caught in his throat upon thinking that word, his amygdalae pulling the fire alarm of his nervous system, but no, no, I am safe, said a tiny voice in his thalamus, and this is a real world, said the other tiny voice, the one in his prefrontal cortex).
“What did you figure out to call me?” said the man.
“The psyche!” and they laughed their nervous, breathy laugh. “Because you worked with the brain.”
“Hmm,” said the psyche. “Sounds like something out of a storybook. A joke character.”
“Well, best shed your seriousness, your dignity. There’s more to worry about.”
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” he muttered.
“What did you say? Who’s Horatio?”
“That’s just Hamlet. From Shakespeare.”
“A poet in your world?” The gatekeeper looked a little frustrated.
“Yes, but he’s dead. Tell me, do you not have Shakespeare?”
“One world per soul,” recited the gatekeeper.
“One world per soul?”
“Not one soul per world. That would be absurd,” said the gatekeeper, utterly, deathly serious once again.
The psyche put up his hands in defeat.
“Come with me. Let’s go see if the mayor’s busy,” said the gatekeeper, and the psyche felt too blank to resist.
So the pair walked down that slope toward the town. One house rose slightly above the others, but all were small. One story. Smaller than the gatekeeper’s house. Did they have basements? Surely they needed basements on a prairie. Risk of tornadoes and all that. “Do you all have tornadoes?” he asked, suddenly very worried.
“No, haven’t seen any here, not in this part of this world, at least.” The gatekeeper seemed thoroughly uninterested in his question, something else apparently on their mind.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Oh. Nothing in particular. I. Lose my train of thought sometimes. A lot of the time. You know how your memories of your past are patchy? Well, my short-term memory is patchy. Exposure to the corridor does that to you.” And that was that. They walked in silence all the way to that house that was slightly bigger than the others in town. A great many of the little buildings were covered in weatherworn palimpsestic chickenscratchy writing—runes, and letters, sigils, and characters. The man’s temporal lobe felt a déjà vu, the writing on so many surfaces so natural and regular.
They passed people on the roads and people passed them on the roads. The road was made of compacted prairie dirt. A child wearing a SpongeBob hoodie walked by with a goat on a rope. The goat turned and stared at this new figure with those empty brown eyes straight out of hell, but the child merely nodded to the gatekeeper, as disinterested in the new guy as a human could possibly be.
The psyche almost asked the gatekeeper about the goat, but expected some sort of blasé answer, such as, What do you mean, why do we have goats? Of course we have goats.
A brown puppy cantered up to the psyche, all big feet and big eyes, its movement loose and sloppy. The psyche bent over and let the puppy smell his hands. It licked his palms and wagged its tail, and the psyche felt himself smile.
“That dog wouldn’t like you if I hadn’t hosed you off,” said the gatekeeper.
“Why not?” He stood up and wiped puppy slobber on his apron. How mundane; how precise.
“You were covered in corridor dust when you came in,” they said. “Animals hate the corridor. I never have figured out how we got them here in the first place.”
“I was covered in dust? I didn’t notice?”
“You were,” the gatekeeper said and ascended the short staircase to the narrow porch of the bigger house. “This is where the mayor lives. He and I do the bulk of the town’s recordkeeping. You’ll get along well with him. Maybe. He was a scientist where he was from, but cannot remember what kind.”
The mayor was a thin man, fairly tall, light skinned, with brown hair and a graying beard. He was ageless, but he looked like he was dying.
“What’s your name?” asked the psyche.
The gatekeeper gently thwacked him in the knee. “You can’t just ask someone what their name is.”
“It’s fine,” said the mayor, quite genially, and the psyche believed him and the gatekeeper visibly relaxed. He was sitting back in a wicker chair, with his legs crossed, one knee over the other, his chin in the palm of one hand, the other hand drumming fingertips to thumbtip, one at a time, on endless repeat. “What’s your name?”
“Not Francesca,” he said, shaking his head. The mayor raised his eyebrows ever so slightly, but said nothing.
“He doesn’t have one,” said the gatekeeper, their voice, again, serious and quite kind.
“That’s fine. I don’t even remember if I had one!” said the mayor, as if it were funny. The gatekeeper smiled. The psyche did not.
“So your name is the mayor?”
“My moniker is the mayor,” the mayor said, with one finger pointing up, his other hand still drumming fingertip to thumbtip, fingertip to thumbtip.
This could not be correct. Jobs do not a name make, and a moniker is almost a name. “Were you always the mayor?”
“Oh no, of course not,” he said, waving his hand. Fingertip to thumbtip, fingertip to thumbtip.
“What were you before?”
“A groundskeeper!”
“And a terrible groundskeeper you were,” said the gatekeeper, deadpan, with eyes glittering.
“That I was. I was so bad,” he said quite gravely, “that you all made me the mayor just to keep me from fucking up the hedges.”
The psyche almost laughed. Maybe he did laugh a little.
“Tell me,” said the mayor, settling into his chair, the wicker creaking, his fingers even stilling. “Are you just passing through? Or looking for something more permanent?”
“Passing through?” the psyche asked blankly. Words were like water, slipping out his temporal lobe before they could dream of settling in his hippocampus or, God forbid, his prefrontal cortex. During the mayor and gatekeeper’s back-and-forth, he’d felt himself dulling like a knife struck too often against a cutting board. All the sharpness he’d held on to, despite his whitewashed memories, was dropping away, a cliff collapsing beneath him.
“Did you leave home on purpose?” elaborated the gatekeeper.
A wall was building between the psyche of the psyche and his corpus, his mind-body connection being severed in real time. “I,” he began, saying the single word as carefully, as delicately, as a prayer. “I think so. Either way.” He frowned, a big, deep, comical frown—he felt it, his cranial nerves told him so. “Either way, I don’t miss it. They all called me Francesca there. No one would listen to me that it wasn’t my name.”
“We won’t call you Francesca here,” said the mayor, quietly. The gatekeeper nodded. And the world peeled, like a slipping bandage.
The psyche did not remember the immediately succeeding lines of questioning, nor did he remember how he wound up wide awake on a futon in the middle of the night, a kerosene lamp burning low and quiet. His working memory had failed to be converted into long-term storage. He looked at his hands. The nails were still painted gray. He needed some acetone to remove the polish, but could not fathom a town like this having acetone, even if there was a kid wearing a SpongeBob hoodie.
How’d the hoodie even get there?
“Where’d the kid get the hoodie?” he asked as soon as the door to his room (he had decided, within his own brain case, that this was his room now, for now) slipped open.
“What hoodie?” asked the gatekeeper. He could remember the gatekeeper. He could remember the mayor. He could remember them asking him questions, and then he could remember nothing.
“The SpongeBob hoodie.”
The gatekeeper looked at him blankly.
“I saw a kid wearing a SpongeBob hoodie,” he said, slowly, delicately, trying not to sound panicked, trying not to sound upset, worried, overwhelmed. The gatekeeper looked mostly as blank as ever, but was managing an apologetic kind of smile. “The little yellow guy? With big eyes?”
“There is a kid who wears a hoodie with a little yellow guy on it, yes,” said the gatekeeper, audibly relieved.
“Where’d the kid get the hoodie?” The psyche heard his voice crack.
“Oh, I don’t know. The spelunker brought it in.” They paused. “From the corridor.”
Again, a space of time where working memory failed to convert.
The psyche found his self-awareness again while sitting at a kitchen table. In one hand, a cup of what looked like coffee, but chicory scented. The other hand rested on a butter knife on a plate with a half-eaten slice of bread. In seconds, he remembered a basement, a cornfield, a town, a goat, a dog, a mayor, a kid in a SpongeBob hoodie, a futon, a kerosene lamp.
“How long have I been here?”
The gatekeeper said from behind him: “Two days.” And then. “You’ve asked seven times,” they said, but not unkindly.
“Let’s hope I stay around this time.” And then, again, the world peeled.
The psyche, in bed, wrapped in a linen and a quilt, a burrito of fabric and flesh. The mayor sat in another wicker chair—wicker chairs seemed to appear for this man, whenever he needed a seat—how illogical a thought, said the tiniest of voices in the psyche’s prefrontal cortex. The amygdalae rolled their eyes.
He pulled himself out of the blankets, still in his clothes from the other day, drenched in sweat, and his same socks. He stared around the room: It was night outside—but not in?—and little light seeped in from the windows. Out, far, far from the house, he could see the horizon, where navy met a different shade of navy, and he breathed. The air was lightly oily. The kerosene lamp burned at the dimmest setting, and the mayor was watching the little flame, very pointedly not looking at the psyche.
“Why—” the psyche began, but his voice croaked, unused. He cleared his throat and continued, “Why are you here?”
The mayor turned very slowly to look at him. His eyes were blank, colorless in the pale kerosene gleam, and his face was blank as a sheet. He shook his head. “What else do I have to do?”
“I don’t know,” said the psyche, but he didn’t dispute it. “What’s happening to me?”
“When you’re in the hallway,” began the mayor. “When you’re in the hallway, we believe, the spirit separates from the self. The mind melts off the body that constructs the mind. If the mind is the story we tell ourselves, the body is the set of words we use to do it. I. I don’t always know how to tell people this, but I was a neuroscientist, like you probably were. I often say I don’t remember. But I do. At least vaguely, patchily. Neuroscientists had a bad reputation in our world.” The mayor shuddered and continued, breathlessly, “I’m sure you remember basic physiology, basic cell biology? Neurotransmitters and the like?”
The psyche nodded, like a child, but he knew. He knew neuroanatomy and its physiology. He knew the what, and how it was pieced together.
“Well, when you enter the hallway, your body gets dragged along with you, but your mind does its own thing, unbeholden to buildup of amyloid plaques, to misfolded tau, to damaged language-processing areas, or lobotomies, even to the processing speed of the action potential. But long-term potentiation? You know, memory?”
The psyche didn’t remember, not quite yet, but in the space of time it took his corpus to nod, he heard his hippocampus say, like a loading dock, but in someone else’s voice. A professor’s? A long, long time ago? The voice continued, one neuron fires and passes neurotransmitters to another neuron. That neuron realizes it’ll need more receptors for all the neurotransmitters, so it builds them, like a shipping center builds a loading dock for all its packages.
“Well, you see, that gets washed up too. You are your body, when you’re in a world. But the hallway takes the story you tell yourself about your mind oh-so-seriously. And it splits the two. When you enter a world and get back together again, you’re a ghost. Well, most people become ghosts. The body is forever disjointed from the mind. Memories can be made inaccessible. Memories can be hard to form.
“Or,” he said, leaning back in his chair, the wicker creaking, “that’s how we understand it. Because none of us really understand what it is. The only people who get it are those who don’t become ghosts. Those who stay fully cognizant, whose minds don’t peel off their bodies as a hapless simulacrum of the goings-on of flesh, of salt and fat and sugar, people whose minds stay sane, who stay real—those are the people who don’t give a shit about the hallway. But you cared. You liked the hallway.”
The psyche could not figure out if this was an accusation, but it was delivered so mildly, with neither venom nor flare, so he guessed it wasn’t, but he was already saying, “What’s wrong with liking the hallway?”
“Oh, nothing. I did too, looking back. They thought I didn’t, so they started training me to be a spelunker, but then I started losing time, like you, so they made me the groundskeeper, and that was fine by me.”
“What’s a spelunker do?”
“A spelunker is someone who doesn’t love the hallway,” said the mayor. “Spelunkers go back into the hallway and walk through all the other worlds, looking for things we can’t find here.”
“I’m dull,” said the psyche very suddenly, nearly interrupting the mayor. “I was sharp, and now I am dull.”
“I’m guessing it was like what happened to me,” the mayor replied, one-third under his breath. “Where you show up mostly fine, and then you start peeling. Now, why that happens, I don’t have the slightest guess.”
“What’ll happen to me?”
“Some—many, in fact—recover much of their cognitive ability, if …” The mayor began again to touch fingertip to thumbtip, fingertip to thumbtip.
“If?”
The mayor’s blank face became serious, eyes and mouth downturning. “If they stay here.”
“What happens if I go back out there?”
“You’ll melt.” A swimming, a swarming of locusts, began in the psyche’s head, but it was just the blood pounding in his ears. He felt his consciousness begin to peel off his body. The mayor continued, incorrigible. “You probably nearly melted before you got here. As in, you began to fade out, become one with the hallway. But—you had a last fleeting bit of self-preservation and let yourself into a world, hoping it would save you.”
The mayor sounded so far away. Fuzzed blackness set into his vision. “I saw the checkered tablecloth,” said the psyche.
The mayor nodded. “It’s what brought me here too.”
When the psyche next awakened, it was on the basement floor, after purposefully falling asleep on the futon. The mayor had left after the psyche had calmed down, and the gatekeeper had poked their head into the futon room and, upon receiving a simple nod from the psyche, carefully closed the door and went to bed.
The basement floor was covered in dust. Pale dust swept out from the corridor, and beige dust swept in from the prairie. There was a rocking horse amid all the things, with the paint of the saddle worn off the brown plastic, and it made the psyche want to cry, even though he didn’t think he’d cried in a long, long time. There were cardboard boxes galore, most brown, some white, and then great wooden crates, nailed shut. Going by the twinning splashes of red on one of the crates and on one of his knees, he’d tripped while sleepwalking and come to on the floor. Why is hallway dust white? That time, it was the voice of his thalamus, but he ignored it and picked himself up off the ground.
The next morning, in the kitchen with the gatekeeper, with orangey light slanting around flamingo-print curtains, he asked, twiddling his thumbs, “Can we lock the basement?”
“Why?” The gatekeeper didn’t even turn around from rooting through a cabinet.
“I sleepwalked in.”
“And you didn’t trip down the stairs?” they said, finally turning around.
“I mean, I guess not. But I did trip over a giant crate.”
The gatekeeper nodded. “If you’re worried about the corridor, you can’t sleep in there, so you’d wake up on the threshold. But no,” they continued. “We cannot lock the basement door. In case someone comes in.”
What if, an intruder! chimed in the amygdalae, quite unhelpfully. How else would you have gotten in here? pointed out the prefrontal cortex, if they kept the door locked. The amygdalae and the rest of the limbic system nodded in pale acceptance, and the cerebellum, blankly, flatly, joined in. “Ah,” was all he said in response.
A knock at the kitchen door, and it opened, letting in the mayor and a brief gust of wind. The gatekeeper got down an extra mug from the cabinets, the varnish tinted nearly gold in the sunlight, and poured it full of chicory coffee.
“Are you going to stay here?” asked the mayor, a continuation of his days-old line of inquiry, once all were sitting around the table.
“Oh,” said the psyche, trying to get his synapses working, trying to get his neurons to talk to each other. “Is there anywhere else in the world?”
The mayor frowned. The gatekeeper frowned. “We don’t know.”
“There are birds—” began the psyche, his speaking capacity coming back in a rush. “There are birds, and so they must go somewhere depending on the season. There’s a river, so there must be headwaters, and there must be a mouth. There’s the horizon.”
The mayor and the gatekeeper looked at each other. The former kept his mouth shut, and the latter said, “We, traditionally, don’t talk about the horizon. What’s beyond it. Some people go to the horizon and then they come back, and they don’t tell anyone what they saw.”
“What if they did?”
“Everyone else would be quite upset,” said the gatekeeper, astonishingly mildly.
“Would they be killed?” Bile rose in the psyche’s throat.
“No, I don’t think so. We don’t execute people here. But people would be upset,” the gatekeeper said and picked up their mug.
“Why would they be upset?” All was wrong.
“Well,” said the mayor while the gatekeeper slurped their chicory. “What if there’s an edge?”
The mayor’s inane comment shut down the horizon discussion pretty much immediately. (An edge? Were there not birds? Was there not rain?) They all drank their chicory, and the mayor and gatekeeper discussed town matters. At one point, the gatekeeper got out the so-called ledger-of-the-dead, and the two pointed out names and occupations of the deceased as the psyche slipped slowly into himself.
“Psyche?” said the gatekeeper, quite suddenly, from the psyche’s perspective, but previous repetitions of his moniker hung in the air.
“Yes?” The psyche found himself burning his hands, gripping his mug as tightly as he was. He set the mug down on the table and rubbed his palms together in an attempt to dissipate the heat.
“If you’re going to stay here, which I guess you are?” The gatekeeper raised their eyebrows as they said this.
“For now,” said the psyche, shrugging, in an attempt to retain some dignity, some decorum.
“If you’re going to stay here, for now, would you like a task?”
“What sort of task?” The psyche began to drum his fingertips on the tabletop, but abruptly caught himself and quit.
“An occupation,” the mayor cut in. “For lack of better phrasing. Something to pass the time; something that won’t take up all your time.”
“What occupations are there?” The psyche snorted.
“Well, you were a scientist. Would you like a task with the mechanists? Repairing the solar panels and the like.”
“How the hell do you all have solar panels?”
“They’ve always been,” said the mayor, and, at the psyche’s raised eyebrows, continued, “They’ve been since before. Since before anyone remembers.”
“So you’re not supposed to ask too many questions here, huh?” The psyche felt himself frown, deeply, even heartbrokenly.
“Not like that—” began the mayor.
“It’s like”—the gatekeeper sighed—“everyone here is very, very broken. You don’t really walk through a door into the corridor if you’re happy. And then because you’re sad, because you love the corridor so much, it eats you.”
“A violent way of putting it,” said the mayor with a subtle smile.
The gatekeeper almost smirked, but not quite.
“You asked if I was gonna stay. What if I left?” asked the psyche.
“We won’t stop you from leaving. We cannot stop you,” said the mayor. “Just know. It would be dangerous to go back into the hallway. You’re still losing time?”
The psyche’s responsorial silence told the mayor all he needed to know. He sat back in his chair and looked at the psyche with a curiously flat expression.
“Then I don’t want to work with the mechanists,” said the psyche.
“Would you meet with the quantum mechanic, at least?” asked the gatekeeper, placatingly.
The quantum mechanic? said the prefrontal cortex with a nasty hoot of a laugh. “I don’t want to work with the mechanists, but I do want to work with my hands.”
The mayor smiled slightly, an expression that slowly but steadily grew into a beam. “We’ll find you such a task. Do you still like the moniker the psyche?”
The psyche gently slapped his palms together once, then twice. “I never liked it, but I never didn’t like it.”
That warranted a beam, this time from the gatekeeper.
The mayor found a task for him. Preparing the goats’ feed. In the morning and in the evening. “That’s it,” said the mayor.
The next morning, the psyche awakened even before the gatekeeper. He made chicory coffee, melted goat cheese on sourdough in the oven for breakfast, and served it to himself with a sliced tomato from the gatekeeper’s garden, freshly plucked, while the chicory percolated. There was a distant sense-memory from within his thalamus of preparing this same meal, a memory where the window is open and the air is lit up yellow and smells like goatleaf honeysuckle. In the present (what present? no present! screamed his parietal cortex, disoriented from time), he wrapped his arms around himself and squeezed his own shoulders.
Work—should he even call it that?—was fine. His task was fine. The goatherd was kind enough, and said little, mere phrases and grunts. He wasn’t overtly friendly, but was gentle instead, especially with the goats. (He had his son slaughter them.) He was a nice man to work for. (You’re not working for anyone! declared the amygdalae.)
The task scratched, somewhat, his hippocampus’s urge to twitch his hands. Even more so, it scratched his cerebellum’s urge to move, to lift, to throw, to balance. His muscles ached the next day despite the relatively brief exertions, but he was grateful for a physical sensation and went down to the goat barn. Despite the goatherd’s few and scattered words, he didn’t want to leave the man hanging.
Even with his new occupation, it took a while before the psyche gathered the courage to leave the big house and move down the slope to town. To leave the gatekeeper’s house was to acknowledge, to the town, but more importantly, to himself, that he intended on staying here, for however long. He’d spoken to so few townspeople, mostly the mayor, the gatekeeper, and the goatherd. The sheer mass of world-hopping flesh that moved now between the buildings, the cornfield, the river, the old quarry, was mind-boggling, and it kept the psyche fairly isolated.
The gaps in his memory shortened, but they still appeared. Like holes punched in an ever-unrolling sheet of butcher paper. But now, gradually, fewer and farther between.
“One’s not supposed to stay with the gatekeeper forever,” the mayor said, quite kindly. “The gatekeeper’s task is to take care of passersby and give people time to find themselves again. Eventually someone new comes in from out of the hallway and they need help too.”
So the psyche packed the small tote’s worth of possessions he had accumulated since his arrival. A book in some novel dialect of English. Another book, this one of birds, many of which could be found in and around town; the ones that couldn’t be found were denoted with a large question mark in red ink, and the ones that could be found but weren’t in the book were sketched crudely in the endpages. A jar of sourdough starter. Another jar, of pickles. And his grand total of three outfits of clothes.
He said goodbye to the gatekeeper and walked down the brief slope toward his new home in town. A generation or two ago had built extra little houses and connected them to the water supply, so there were always extra unoccupied.
The duster was waiting out front of the house. The duster’s name was Jeanie. She was tall and had a waterfall of wavy dark hair in a ponytail. “Hello!” she said. The psyche hadn’t met her before; she, even more so than the mayor, appeared the most cheerful person he’d met yet in town. “I chased out the possums,” she declared, quite proudly.
“There are possums here?”
“Yes, of course.”
“How’d they get here?”
“Maybe one day we’ll know, but today is not that day,” said Jeanie, sliding open the door and walking in, free as you please. Something was off about her manner of speaking, and his Wernicke’s area was twitching, working overtime.
The psyche followed. He had a water closet, tiny, tucked away in the corner, like an afterthought, and a sink and a stove, and a bed and a couch, and splintery cabinets. “All this? All this was built before my arrival? How many people have lived here?”
“Oh, just, maybe one other person? Some many seasons ago,” said Jeanie. The psyche felt on the precipice of understanding what was happening.
“What were they like?”
Jeanie smiled again, a real, genuine smile, because she didn’t know. “Oh! I never met them. I just saw the records when I was assigned to dust this place.”
Oh. She wasn’t speaking English. That’s why nothing sounded quite regular. He had never before heard the language she was speaking. It was nothing like English or Spanish, and it didn’t really sound like Mandarin (where had he gotten familiar with Mandarin? Work? His job? Lifetimes ago? His parietal cortex had damn near given up on the order of things relative to the progression of time), but he could understand what she was saying. He shoved that awareness way down deep—certainly it would be rude, or at least weird, to comment on their differences in language. She didn’t seem to be struggling to understand him, and she didn’t seem to be making a big deal of it. Conclusion: This was normal?
“How many places do you have to dust?” he asked, in part because he was curious (certainly it would be a lot) and also as a way of distracting himself.
“Oh, not that many.”
“What do you do? When you’re not dusting.” The psyche’s prefrontal cortex tried and failed to spin it all together.
“Help others out? Whatever I want, really?” said Jeanie.
The psyche nodded, acting like he understood. What did he want to do? “Do you have any acetone?”
“Yeah, the mayor has it, in the storeroom. Just go ask him.” With that, she left, with a wave and another real smile.
That evening, right after the goats were fed, the psyche walked right up to the mayor’s house and knocked on the door. He could dimly hear a muffled “Come in!” so he let himself in. The mayor was sat in the back room, poking at some sheets of paper and writing on others. He looked up at the psyche with his blissfully blank face that belied that strange sharpness, that insistent cheerfulness.
“Why do you speak English?” asked the psyche.
“Das Englisch?”
“You’re German?”
“Deutsche,” said the mayor. “But not from your world. I can tell. A different Germany than the one you would’ve known. You’re from a bad world. I’m not the best at guessing, but I think you were.”
“Why do you speak English and not German, if I’d be able to understand German?”
The corners of the mayor’s mouth turned down in a frown. The first the psyche’d seen the mayor make that expression. “I forgot how to speak it.”
It was hard, after that, to ask the mayor where the storeroom was, but he did. And he walked home, his pockets full of objects. When he made it to his home—there were no locks on the door, so he just walked right in—he began to take stock of the walls, seeing how much space they had. They were very well scribbled on, like many building walls in town, but he had paper.
While calculating the dimensions of the walls, he realized he was alone for the first time in ages, not since the hallway—no. No, he wasn’t alone, not with the people and dogs and goats loitering across the road, with others slowly heading home themselves, people who spoke languages he’d never heard, and others who’d forgotten how.
The psyche slept easy that night, even though he hadn’t expected to.
Memory is born of molecules, but that isn’t concrete enough for us—we need to think of one neuron building a loading dock for all the packages it receives from the preceding neuron. Molecules aren’t concrete enough for us, so we leave marks of ourselves all over the world, hoping they will jar our recollection.
From the storeroom in the mayor’s house, in addition to acetone and a spare rag for stripping the polish from his fingernails, the psyche had grabbed tape and small slips of thick paper he’d have once called index cards. He kept the cards in his pockets as he went about town, to his tasks, to the grocer, on his walks to the river, and wrote on them what each of the voices in his head said, grateful, as always, for Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas for transliterating action potentials, synaptic firings into language. He credited each line to the area of the brain responsible for the origin of the signal.
On his wall, he built a map. A great big brain, the left hemisphere, made of index cards. In his head, he flipped the brain, and next to it, made a right hemisphere, also out of index cards.
A few weeks passed, and the index card brain grew to multiple layers, and even one sagittal cross section at midline, to show the inner workings of his limbic system. He had a thick stack of index cards at the spot where his amygdala was. It always had something to tell him.
His mind felt stapled back together, and staples slip out sometimes, but sometimes they don’t.
These days, he rarely saw the gatekeeper, but he’d heard that a new person had shown up in the basement, but someone who had been whole, and who had things to get back to, or new things to see. A true and legitimate trespasser, not a dissociated ghost, like nearly everyone else, or the detached spelunkers, who craved the thick yellow light of a real sun so much that they could always come home. The psyche had heard tell of these trespassers by this point. They very rarely slipped in from out the hallway, too many too interesting things to look at out elsewhere. People unfazed by the cruelties of too many worlds.
The psyche was sat in a wicker chair by his great wall of self, imagining different cards in different places, second-guessing his gut feeling regarding his initial placements. His enteric nervous system made his stomach gurgle and ache at the thought. Should he make a whole damn set of brain and spinal cord and nerves? questioned his pissed-off amygdalae. Yes, he should! declared the enteric nervous system, as if it understood language. In real life, with his physical corpus, he rolled his eyes.
One morning, after preparing the goats’ feed, the psyche headed up the slope to the big house and found the gatekeeper sitting in their garden. For someone so fastidiously clean everywhere else, in every other aspect of their life, they sure were coated in mud.
“Why do you grow corn here, too, when there’s the big cornfield down by the river?” asked the psyche, taking a seat on a little hillock of dirt, dodging the squash and bean vines that spread across everything like blood vessels at a wrist, like capillaries passing through the lungs, like venules and arterioles.
The gatekeeper didn’t answer right away, just sat and thought and tried to breathe for a moment. “Because I want to.”
Because I want to breathe, because sometimes I want to care for something that asks nothing of me, guessed the psyche’s somatosensory cortex. “I got some chicory beer yesterday. The goatherd gave it to me. Do you want to have some tonight? I’ll cook, if you’ll let me.”
The gatekeeper smiled, soft and gentle.
That night the psyche cooked in the gatekeeper’s kitchen, something he’d very rarely been permitted to do, beyond preparing those breakfasts of goat cheese on toast. He made, the recipe recalled as best he could, chicken paprikash. “Where did you get this paprika?” asked the psyche.
“Oh, the spelunker brought it back for me?” said the gatekeeper, but they didn’t look up from their book, a book written in their runic native language, with deckle-edged pages.
“How’d you learn English?” he asked, ladling paprikash over homemade spaetzle. It’s a good thing, thought the psyche, that spaetzle are supposed to be misshapen anyway, because he could barely remember what they were supposed to look like.
“Your language?” hummed the gatekeeper. “I just picked it up eventually. Living here. Quite a few people speak it.”
They ate their paprikash and noodles in companionable silence. “How do you live here by yourself?” asked the psyche, poking at the pile of noodles with his fork.
“I’m not alone,” they said, staring directly ahead at him, then glancing down and over to the basement door.
The psyche swallowed an empty mouthful. “When I was a child,” he began, “I would go out in the yard at night and look up at the sky, and hope a plane would pass overhead. Because that was proof there was world outside the town we lived in.”
The gatekeeper nodded, understanding, understanding so much that they said nothing in response.
“I have another question,” said the psyche, trying to sop up paprikash sauce with a slice of sourdough. That particular flavor combination was not stellar.
“My,” the gatekeeper said. “You’re just full of questions today.” They got up from the table and turned up the kerosene lamp in the parlor.
The psyche smiled and cracked open the large bottle of chicory beer and poured it into two glasses. “Were you from a good world, or a bad one?” he asked, handing one to the gatekeeper. “Or, an in-between?”
The gatekeeper smirked, the first time the psyche had observed that expression on their face, a smirk that turned into a melancholic smile, with the head tilted down. They held their glass between both hands. “A good one.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“I was bored,” said the gatekeeper, and the psyche knew that wasn’t the whole of it. One day. One day, he’d get the answer. Another day, perhaps, he’d go to the horizon. He wondered what his amygdalae would have to say.
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